top | item 25745908

Leaked memos Amazon warn 'be vigilant' due to threats to blow up data centers

140 points| randycupertino | 5 years ago |businessinsider.com | reply

215 comments

order
[+] ttt0|5 years ago|reply
I just want to point out, that on the screen cap from the tweet they quoted, the Parler post was from 9 secs ago. Maybe it's legit or maybe not, think of it what you will.

https://twitter.com/JohnPaczkowski/status/134811382832466739...

[+] m-p-3|5 years ago|reply
Please note that I do not condonce violence of any kind, and I am okay with Parler being shut down. That said, I saw this tweet as a reply

> They are banned from social media because they were inciting violence. > > Their platform is being shutdown because they were inciting violence. > > And now they are inciting violence because of that?

Some of these angry users obviously don't appreciate being silenced, no matter how awful their message is. I totally get silencing their message if it's threatening someone, but how else can they voice their opposition to Parler being shut down? They become deplatformed, and no one is willing to listen to them or publish their message.

At some point, they'll just reach a breaking point where they feel the only way to be listened is to use extreme measures. I frankly don't know what we can do to defuse this situation other than punishing those directly associated with hateful messages instead of deplatforming everyone on it.

[+] brentm|5 years ago|reply
The "time ago" for comments on Parler was always a little suspect to me. I was poking around on there and noticed how so many of the comments were from seconds ago. The timestamps could be legit but it also seemed like maybe an engagement hack. You could argue someone might be more likely to respond to a comment that they think someone literally just wrote.
[+] ben_w|5 years ago|reply
9s before the screenshot was taken, as shown in a tweet from 2 days ago. I don’t have enough info to say when the screenshot was taken, but the leaked copies of all the Parler data should be able to confirm/refute the veracity.
[+] spamizbad|5 years ago|reply
I’m sure someone will chime in saying that person is simply participating in a robust debate on free speech and is simply steelmanning an argument against political violence by blowing up a data center IRL to test a hypothesis. NOT destroying us-east-1 would stifling both science and liberty!

Or some dumb bs like that

[+] newacct583|5 years ago|reply
That kind of latency is routine for scrapers and archivers, and of course any time you click on message replies you get the most recent ones at the top. This doesn't seem so weird to me.

Are you saying the post was deliberately fabricated to provoke outrage? It's really not that far out of the realm of what really was happening on Parler. That doesn't mean it was a concrete threat, but assuming that Amazon is deliberately inventing threats against its own data centers seems a bit much.

I just... I mean I don't understand what's happening to discourse on the right of the US political spectrum right now. Our capitol was just sacked. The Oregon state house was invaded. The governor of Michigan was the target of a kidnapping plot... But everyone wants to pretend that none of these things should inform our priors about the potential for right wing violence?

[+] stunt|5 years ago|reply
> "The company also has implemented new service update restrictions at some data centers this week, reflecting the growing concern for a potential cyber attack or volatility in its service in the coming days." https://outline.com/P3tAMN

Pure speculation, but I wonder if they're also trying to protect themselves against insider threats as well with this move.

[+] echelon|5 years ago|reply
A deploy freeze is meant to stop production from potentially needing to be rolled back when bugs are introduced at a time engineers are away (holidays) or fighting other fires (earnings calls, DDOS, Prime Day, etc).

You don't want engineers breaking things when you've got something else distracting you.

[+] whoknew1122|5 years ago|reply
Insider threats are an issue for every business. But AWS has robust policies in place to avoid this.

Even routine code pushes and changes to production infrastructure typically need a second-person review, among other things.

[+] stunt|5 years ago|reply
We should hold resourceful politicians with their megaphones accountable for what they advocate instead of silencing people or groups that are following them which will only irritate them.
[+] root_axis|5 years ago|reply
Banning them is holding them accountable. Their irritation is not rational, they are quite "irritated" by the peaceful transition of power; no more coddling of these bad faith actors, when they stop fomenting chaos in our society then they can be allowed to shitpost on twitter once again, because of course, restricting the freedom to stoke violence online is the real story here, not their literal attack on democracy.
[+] jtbayly|5 years ago|reply
It will not only irritate them. It will enrage them, add many others to their ranks, and likely lead to much more drama and violence.
[+] eplanit|5 years ago|reply
I've been thinking that Amazon ought to be protecting distribution centers (likely a little less hardened than data centers), and their distribution and delivery network (much softer targets).

Unlike Twitter and Facebook, Amazon has a much larger attack surface.

[+] konceptz|5 years ago|reply
It must be hard, as an employee, to be asked to consider these types of actions at your job.
[+] swiley|5 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure designing with the expectation that people might try to drive a truck/plane into the building is pretty normal for data center design. People have been aware of destructive people for a while.
[+] salmon|5 years ago|reply
Aren't the locations of most of the AWS data centers kept pretty private for reasons exactly like this?
[+] TigeriusKirk|5 years ago|reply
How secret could they realistically be?
[+] slx26|5 years ago|reply
Wouldn't they be easy enough to triangulate quite precisely anyway?
[+] BFatts|5 years ago|reply
The far-right panders to extreme fear while the far-left panders to extreme progress. I'd much rather work with the far-left than the far-right.
[+] bob1029|5 years ago|reply
Now I have to wonder when our customers are going to start asking if we have recently reviewed our business continuity plans.
[+] api|5 years ago|reply
We might actually be on the verge of a civil war, but it won't look like the last one. It will look more like "the troubles" in Ireland.
[+] SifJar|5 years ago|reply
"the troubles" were in Nothern Ireland, not Ireland
[+] Gollapalli|5 years ago|reply
The main divide doesn't seem to be between states, but between urban and rural. If you look at a the map by county, I think it gives a decent picture: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/graphics/2020/11/10/electi...

This is one from 2016 and is red-blue binary. It is perhaps the most illustrative: https://blueshift.io/election-2016-county-map.html

This makes peaceful resolution very difficult, as we're dealing with two groups who largely live apart from one another, with different geography, culture, and social mores. I think it's important to emphasize, there are a lot of people who genuinely believe that systemic voting irregularities influenced our last election, to the point of having changed the outcome, and don't view Joe Biden as having been legitimately elected. Furthermore, they believe that the courts, especially the Supreme Court, refused to even hear their case, and that Congress would in no way give their grievances with the process an open debate, before accepting results they viewed as fraudulent. This puts them into a position of desperation. The videos of people being arrested at the airport do not help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxwJ5HXSzuA

Given the geography. I expect to see red-hats (Trump people) going into the cities where the blue-hats (centrists) and the black-hats (Antifa/BLM) live, and then retreating into the rural areas, where supportive sheriffs are more likely to run interference against other law-enforcement agencies. To some extent, this is what we already saw at the Capitol Building, as well in places like Kenosha where people like Kyle Rittenhouse came from out-of town (albeit within reasonable driving distance) to the city where violence was occurring.

EDIT: better link

EDIT 2: The phrase "I've thought a lot about this" suggests that one has thought more of themselves thinking about the issue, than about the issue itself. As such It has been removed.

[+] 0x_rs|5 years ago|reply

[deleted]

[+] analyte123|5 years ago|reply
Politicians who want to gin up anger and money from their supporters and stigmatize their political opponents, intelligence agencies and defense contractors who will see increased power and funding, a variety of NGOs and corporations who will be delegated power to “fight domestic terror”. Whoever benefited from the original Patriot Act. Plus lots of clicks and views for media outlets that have found a new panic now that the current president who generates all their traffic is leaving.
[+] blockmarker|5 years ago|reply
Nobody expected that the Capitol would be broken into, this could be that people don't know what to expect anymore and are panicking.
[+] willis936|5 years ago|reply
The answer is “nobody”. Giving credence to fringe conspiracy theories is actively damaging society and you should consider weighing probabilities of explanations from multiple points of view before committing to one, certainly before typing a comment online.
[+] jedimastert|5 years ago|reply
The FBI said that a week ago. "Who in God's name would mount an armed insurrection on the nation's capitol?"

Once bitten, twice shy

[+] neilsense|5 years ago|reply

[deleted]

[+] helen___keller|5 years ago|reply
I'm not sure what your point is. I'll bet Bezos was plenty concerned about gallows outside his house, but I don't know what that has to do with literally any of this. Is he supposed to send out a memo to employees warning them to be vigilant in case gallows show up outside their houses too, or outside of amazon data centers?
[+] yabones|5 years ago|reply
No, because they are not equal threats.

A dangerous terror cell, which has already invaded the US Capitol, is now threatening to bomb critical infrastructure. If this was the Taliban you wouldn't be asking this question.

[+] rtkwe|5 years ago|reply
I don't think the guillotine was meant as a literal threat to his life personally. It was a wage protest lead by a former Amazon employee and IIRC was never violent.
[+] jtbayly|5 years ago|reply
I read that it was a guillotine and Amazon employees, but your point still stands.
[+] gadders|5 years ago|reply
I can't help thinking this is some post-ban PR campaign by Facebook, Twitter, Amazon etc to justify what they did and gain them some public sympathy.
[+] AnIdiotOnTheNet|5 years ago|reply
While possible, given recent events it is hardly stretching the imagination to believe this is legitimate is it?

Need you be reminded that a group of armed radical right wing extremists forcibly invaded a session of congress with the expressed intent of executing politicians?

Honestly, it is difficult to believe that anyone saying further right-wing violence is unlikely is arguing in good faith.